Sensory Deprivation
by Refur
Summary: When an encounter in the woods goes south, the Winchester brothers lose something important.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **First SPN fic, so I really appreciate any concrit from older hands in the fandom that I've only been in two days ;). Supernatural and its characters and settings do not belong to me.**  
**

**Sensory Deprivation**

"Where are we again?" asked Dean, and could have sworn he heard Sammy say _another nothing place_.

Instead, his brother lifted his eyes briefly from the newspaper he was reading and said "Fremont, Minnesota."

"Right." Sam went back to reading the paper. Nothing else seemed to be required of him, and Dean was long past the cold pancakes and congealing maple syrup that lay in front of him on the scratched formica table, so he stretched and muttered something about getting some air. Sam didn't really seem to notice.

Outside the diner – _another nowhere diner_ – the autumn air was heavy and damp, not the cool, crisp kind that makes red and gold leaves crunch beneath your feet, but the clammy kind that makes them rot and squelch. Dean never had much cared for woods – too many places for things to hide. Here that seemed all there was, though, although it was only a two hour drive from the nearest city (_St. Paul/Boston/Phoenix delete as appropriate_) through open fields. Five minutes before you reached the town, the woods closed in.

"Dean!"

Dean turned and raised his eyebrows at his brother, who was exiting the diner waving the newspaper and half-grinning. "You get something?" he asked.

"I think so," Sam said, and spread the newspaper out on the soaking hood of the Impala. The fine mist in the air – just this side of drizzle – started to drench the paper almost imperceptibly, but somehow much faster than something which in the end is only humidity should be able to manage. Sam's long, newsprint-stained finger taps on a headline, the bold black ink of the letters already beginning to run. _LOCAL BOY IN COMA AFTER FOUND IN WOODS_. He pushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes, and said, "this kid, some hunter found him in the woods and now he's in a coma."

Dean rolled his eyes. "No shit, Sherlock. Why do we care?"

Sam shot him an annoyed glance. "Because the doctors can't figure out what's wrong with him. See?" he points at another place in the article. "Their best guess is it's some kind of abnormal stroke or seizure."

"Hate to break it to ya, Dr. Kildare, but strokes and seizures ain't exactly our speciality."

"No," Sam said, and that half-grin was back, the one that couldn't quite be a full smile because it was caused by something bad happening to someone else, "but abnormal is."

----

"Hi there ma'am," Dean said, smiling broadly and turning on the charm, "I wonder if you could help us. We're here to see Tommy Gardner?"

The hospital registrar took her sweet time finishing whatever she was doing before she looked up. She was an older woman, in her early fifties maybe, and she wasn't buying it, Dean could tell straight away. He cranked his smile up another notch or two.

"You family?" she asked, eyeing him up and down.

_Why not?_

"Why yes, ma'am, we are. We're his cousins." He heard Sam shifting uncomfortably behind him, and restrained himself from rolling his eyes. Kid never had been any good at the whole acting thing.

The registrar lifted a suspicious eyebrow. "His mother didn't say anything about any cousins coming by," she said, her voice as cool as the clicking sound of high heels on the hospital's polished floor.

Dean didn't let his guard down for an instant. "We're from out of state. We were just in the neighbourhood and we heard what happened, thought we'd drop in on the little tyke, see how he's doing."

The eyebrow went higher. "He's a little to old to be a little tyke, Mr...?"

"Granville," Dean said without thinking (_Granville, Martin Roger, that was the name on the credit card this week_), and mentally kicked himself. Then Sam shuffled slightly and leaned forward, his hair falling into his eyes.

"We're from his mother's side of the family," he said, and Dean had to take back his earlier thought about his brother's acting skills, there was just the right combination of false cheerfulness and slight brokenness to the voice, and the registrar's suspicions were instantly dispelled, "and he'll always be a little tyke to us."

After they'd been directed to the room – 227, down the hall to the elevator and up two floors – Dean sneaked a sidelong glance at his brother, slightly impressed, slightly resentful. Why couldn't _he_ ever have that effect on them? No, he was forced to admit, it wasn't his brother's acting skills that were the problem. It was just that he didn't enjoy it.

The hospital smelt like hospitals always do – the pine-fresh scent just masking the underlying smell of age and sickness. It was clean and quiet, typical small town sick-house. 227 looked just the same as all the other doors, and Sam was raising his hand to knock when Dean suddenly grabbed hold of him and hauled him out of the way.

"Hey!" Sam said, but Dean covered his mouth and pointed to the door. A matronly nurse was coming out, talking to someone in the room.

"You take care now, Mizz Gardner. You should get some rest."

"Great," Sam muttered. "How the Hell're we gonna convince his mom that we're her nephews?"

But Dean wasn't looking at the door any more. "Sammy, my boy," he said with a grin, "I don't think we're gonna need to."

----

"It's a dreadful thing, just dreadful," the nurse said, smoothing down the sheets on an empty bed with military precision. "Poor little Tommy. Not even as old as you two, and knocked over by a stroke." She shook her head and tutted, as if her disapproval could somehow impact on the forces of life and death.

"So they know it was a stroke, then?" Dean asked, shooting a quick glance at Sam.

The nurse shook her greying head, and pushed her medicine cart out of the door of the vacant room. They followed her quickly.

"To be honest," she said, lowering her voice slightly, "I don't think them doctor's got a clue _what_ it is. I hear em talkin, they're as baffled as may be. Say half his brain just shut down. Like someone flippin a switch. Ain't none of em seen nothin like it before."

This time it was Sam who glanced at Dean, with that triumphant half-grin.

"So which half was it?" Dean asked. Sam glared at him furiously, and the nurse frowned.

"I don't understand, honey," she said.

Sam elbowed him hard in the ribs, but Dean was not going to be put off. "Which half of his brain. Shut down."

The nurse looked surprised, maybe slightly offended. Then she shook her head. "I don't know, they don't really tell us more'n we need to do our jobs. He can breathe on his own, he can swallow. He just can't wake up. Hell of a thing." And she shook her head again, sadly this time.

Sam grabbed Dean's elbow. "Thank you for your time, ma'am," he said, and steered his brother away, still glaring. Dean grinned at him disingenuously.

----

"Seriously, I cannot believe you asked her which _half_."

Dean shrugged, half-pissed at his brother's constant harping on the subject, half-pleased that he had managed to rile him up so much. "Dude, people can't just go around saying stuff like that without arousing curiosity, you know what I'm saying?" He was rewarded with a roll of the eyes, which only caused his grin to spread wider. "I'm _serious_! I mean, what if it turned out that it was a half he didn't use anyway? Though, come to think of it," he frowned thoughtfully, "I don't know how anyone would notice it was shut down then. Maybe if he was all Uri Geller like you and then he tried to bend a spoon and just couldn't do it. I mean, that would make a dent in his takings for the stage show, but it's not like a human tragedy is it?"

"Sometimes I think half of your brain has shut down," Sam growled, pointedly looking away. "And I'm not like Uri Geller."

Dean thought about this, then nodded. "True. In fact, I haven't seen you bend a single spoon yet. Now why is that, Sammy-boy?"

Sam opened his mouth to retort, but was interrupted by the door opening. A moustachioed man in a wife beater and flannel shirt stood in the doorway, looking from one to the other. Dean stepped forward, all business.

"Hello, sir, we're from the _St. Paul Recorder_ and we wanted to talk to you about the boy you found in the woods."

The man stared at him, but this time, Sam's special voice-acting talents were not required. "Come on in," he said.

----

"I was out hunting," the man – his name was Jonsson, Dean recalled – said through his thick moustache. The room they were in bore plenty of evidence to back up this statement: the place was full of parts of what had once been animals, the crowning piece a glassy-eyed bear's head staring down from the wall, its lips twisted in a snarl but actually looking kind of sad. Dean shook himself mentally. His inner monologue was starting to sound like a whiny bitch-boy. Like Sam.

He'd never understood why animal hunters kept trophies. He couldn't imagine wanting a house full of banshee heads and wendigo-foot waste-paper baskets. And it made even less sense if the creature in question posed no threat to you in the first place, he reflected, glancing at the line of deer-heads over the window.

"I heard this scream," the man continued, "and I thought someone was being attacked by a wild animal, so I fired my shotgun to scare it. Then I found the kid laying on the floor, like he was sleeping, only he wouldn't wake up when I shook him. Didn't seem like no animal attack though – kid didn't have a scratch on him. Guess his brain just took and conked out on him. Terrible thing."

Sam leaned forward, his elbows on the knees of his suit that was slightly too small. "You didn't see anything attack him?"

The man – what was his name again? Oh well, moustache-guy would do – shook his head, his drooping whiskers making him look like a doleful walrus. Like he should be mounted on his own wall. "Nope. No tracks neither."

"And there was nothing else... strange?" Sam asked carefully, his pen poised over his notebook.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Terrible thing, so young.

_Dreadful thing. Hell of a thing. Terrible thing._

----

"So, lets tally this up shall we?" Dean said, once they were back in the car. "We have found out exactly... uh..." he raised his hand, pretending to count on his fingers, "oh right, zip. We have no evidence that this was anything other than a normal abnormal seizure. Or something."

Sam sighed, staring out of the window. "I still think there's something about this. Something's not right."

Dean cocked his head on one side. "What do you want to do?"

He knew the answer before Sam turned to him, let his shoulders slump, and pulled out of the parking space, heading for the library.

----

It was less than two hours later when Sam arrived at the motel room. He had agreed to Dean's division of labour (you do the reading, geek boy, I'll find us someplace to sleep) without objections. Dean had found a cheap motel with ugly pink stucco buildings and showers full of silverfish and cockroaches and settled down for a long wait. He was only half-way through disassembling his arsenal when Sam came back.

"Man, you were fast," Dean said. "Dyou learn how to do psychic speed-reading or something?"

Sam glowered and shook his head. He sighed, dropping down into a chair. "I didn't find anything."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Nothing at all?"

Sam shook his head dejectedly. "Not a single case of anything like this happening to someone while they were out in the woods in the last hundred years' worth of the _Fremont Echo_. Got a map, though," he added as an afterthought, wafting it listlessly in Dean's direction.

Dean wiped the oil of his hands with a rag and grabbed the map, taking it to the chipped table to spread it out. "Jesus, these woods go on for _ever_," he said, trying to suppress a slight shiver at the thought of all that endless gloomy twilight under the trees. He was suddenly aware of Sam behind him, craning over his shoulder, interested now.

"Where did that hunter guy say he found Tommy?"

"I don't know, man, you were the one taking notes." But Sam was already flipping through his notebook, and he reached over with a lanky arm and marked a cross in the middle of the vast green space of the map.

Dean turned to look at Sam. "What're you thinking?"

Sam stared at the map. "That's pretty far from the Fremont city limits. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere." He frowned for a moment, then said, "What other settlements are there round the edge of the forest?"

Dean bent over the map, peering at the tiny lettering. "Odense," he read. "Gothenburg. Siegtown. There's a lot of em."

Sam nodded slowly. "We're gonna need to do some more research," he said. Then he looked up. "You want hospitals or morgues?"

Dean snorted. There was no contest: there were very rarely hot nurses manning the phone lines at morgues.

----

After four hours, Dean gave up. He had called dozens of hospitals in the towns and cities that fringed what he had started to privately call the Forest of Doom. Except there wasn't any. Doom, that was. So he was thinking of renaming it to the Forest of Really Fucking Boring. He had, however, talked to several cute chicks.

Sam's nose wrinkled. "How could you tell they were cute? You talked to them on the phone."

Dean grinned and leaned back in his chair. "Sam, dude, you never called a 900 number?" Then he shook his head. "Stupid question. Anyway, nurses or no nurses, I ain't calling no more hospitals. Looks like this is just a stroke after all."

"Not quite," Sam said, and the half-grin came and went so quickly that Dean wasn't even sure he'd seen it at all. "Looks like Tommy was pretty lucky. The rest of the victims didn't get found until it was too late."

Dean sat up, suddenly interested for the first time in hours. "You find something?"

Sam waved his notepad at him. "I'm telling you, man, this area is crawling with underage stroke victims. Kids in their teens, twenties, found in the woods, and their brains have just shut down. No physical damage. Just dead. There's even a _book_," he pulled it out of his bag. "Some anthropology professor writing about how the people in this area are predisposed because they all came from the same area of Scandinavia and they carry a bad gene."

Dean looked nonplussed, staring at the thick volume. "Did you read that whole thing?" he asked, wondering if Sam really did have some crazy speed-reading power.

Sam stared at him. "No, man, I read the introduction and conclusion." He sat down at the table and started doodling on the map.

"OK, so there definitely are strange things afoot at the Circle K," said Dean. "Unless it really is just a weak gene."

Sam shook his head. "No way. These aren't strokes, not with no damage."

Dean nodded slowly. "So what do we know about this thing so far?"

"It likes teenagers and young adults," Sam listed, "it doesn't leave traces, it shuts down brain function without damaging tissue..."

"It can be scared off or repelled by shotgun blasts," Dean put in.

"Right," Sam nodded. "And it seems like it doesn't shut the whole brain down at once, just starts with higher functions, if Tommy's anything to go by."

"OK, well, that's not much," Dean muttered, blowing out a breath.

"Oh, there's one more thing," Sam said, sitting back from the map. Dean saw that what he thought were doodles were actually neat crosses, scattered over a small area near the cross which marked the spot were Tommy Gardner had been found.

"We know where it lives."

----

The mist had definitively crossed the border into drizzle by the time the Impala reached the end of the last dirt track the following morning. They were within about a mile of the area ringed by crosses on the map, and the car could take them no further. Dean peered through the rain-flecked windshield into the misty dimness under the trees, and sighed.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep," murmured Sam, or at least, that's what Dean thought he said.

"What?"

Sam looked round, as if he hadn't realised he'd spoken aloud. "What? Nothing, sorry."

Dean frowned. He didn't like this, but in the absence of any further evidence to go on (all of their diligent searches through dad's journal and their probings into local lore the night before had drawn a blank), recon was the only way to go. He was not excited about the idea of going into the woods without much of an idea of what the thing was, even in the daylight. But, Sam reasoned, they were pretty sure it was scared of shotguns (_what if that had just been a coincidence_), and it wasn't like they were short of that particular brand of weapon.

Once they reached the line of crosses on the map, they began a sweep, Dean with his EMF meter, Sam with his video camera. The woods smelled dank and rotting. Spring was nothing more than a memory here, its youth and loveliness decaying into sludge beneath their feet. _Pretty overdramatic, Dean. We'll make a high-school theatre geek out of you yet._

The EMF meter creaked slightly, and then spiked a couple of times, erratic. "Sam," said Dean, turning, and it was then he realised that he had lost sight of his brother. His hand went straight to his cell phone, but then he heard a familiar voice not far away.

"Dean?"

He relaxed, and started to walk towards the sound. A second later, it came again, and this time there was an urgent tone to it and Dean was anything but relaxed, Dean was running and checking the shotgun at the same time (_just a coincidence, just a coincidence_) and shooting into the air once, and pumping the gun again. And in another few strides he was in a sort of clearing, and he could see Sam on his knees in the slimy leaf-mould, flailing with his arms at his head and shouting _get it off me, Dean_, but he couldn't see anything, there was nothing there, nothing to aim at, and so he fired the gun over Sam's head and started aiming again straight away, cold and clinical, thinking of nothing but how to hit the target, but then Sam collapsed face first into the dirt and he knew, somehow, that the target was gone.

He was at his brother's side in a second. "Sam, Sammy, you OK?" He turned him over, brushing the dead leaves and mud off his face.

Sam coughed and wiped his hand over his face. "Yeah, I'm fine," he said, opening his eyes, blinking. "How long was I out?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "Dude, like, a second. You're such a drama queen."

Sam frowned. "Then how come it got dark so fast?"

Dean stared at him, then around at the woods. Granted, it was pretty misty still, but not really what you'd call dark. "You sure you're OK?"

Sam stared at him, his eyes unfocussed. "God, Dean. Where are you?"

"I'm right here," Dean said, his heart starting to beat faster, feeling panic rising in his throat. "Can't you see me?"

"It's so dark," Sam said, whispered really.

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

But Sam shook his head, not even looking in the right direction, not even looking at Dean's hand. "What fingers, Dean. What... what's going on?"

_Dreadful thing. Hell of a thing. Terrible thing._

_Oh _crap


	2. Chapter 2

Supernatural and its characters are not mine. Many thanks to Evergreene, Sandy Murray, laughandlove, Carikube, bally2cute. pmsdevil01, charmed1of2**  
**and Thru Terry's Eyes for their kind reviews.

Carikube: thanks for the welcome! I feel very at home already, though there seem to be a lot of really good writers in this fandom so I'm a bit apprehensive of the high standards ;).

Thru Terry's Eyes: I'll watch out for the plot, but I haven't been in the fandom long so I'm not sure what counts as trite. I hope I do OK.

----

**Sensory Deprivation 2**

Dean got quickly to his feet when the doctor came out into the hallway. He had only been sitting down for a few moments, sunk in thought. Before that, he had been pacing.

Later he wouldn't remember much between finding Sam on the ground and arriving at the hospital. Wouldn't remember how he had managed to get his brother that mile that seemed like a hundred, through the trees and the tangled undergrowth that he didn't remember being a problem on the way out, when he had been unburdened, when Sammy had been able to _see_. Wouldn't remember whether they talked as he barrelled along the pitted dirt tracks towards the edge of the forest, wouldn't remember barrelling either, though he knew he must have done, because there was no way he would have driven as slowly as those dirt roads required.

They probably hadn't talked.

And then he had been in the hospital, and someone had tried to put Sam in a wheelchair but he had insisted that he was _fine_, that he could walk. And they had taken him away, through one of the featureless doors in the wall of the long, echoing corridor, leaving Dean to sit. And to pace.

"Mr. Granville?" the doctor asked, looking at his chart.

Dean nodded sharply. "My brother OK?"

"Well..." The pause stretched out for more time than Dean had known existed. "Physically, he's in great shape. No damage at all that we can find."

"What?" Dean's voice was low, and the edge in it made the doctor look up, surprised. "But he can't _see_!"

The doctor looked slightly discomfited. "There's no physical explanation for your brother's problem, Mr. Granville. I have to ask, has anything like this happened before?"

"What do you mean?" Dean saw a brief image, a memory of the megawatt smile he had been using in this very hospital the previous day. No smile now. This doctor was not an ally.

"Well... Does your brother have any history of..." the doctor leaned forward slightly, as if he was about to say something obscene, "mental illness?"

Dean stared at the doctor, then laughed. "No way. You're serious? Sam? Sure, the dude's crazy, but he's not, y'know," he crossed his eyes and made circles with his finger by his temple, "_nuts_."

The doctor looked offended, and Dean felt a twinge of satisfaction. _Not an ally_.

"Mr. Granville, mental illness is a very serious issue. I think-"

"Sure, whatever, man," Dean said, affecting nonchalance, but really itching beneath his skin. This conversation had gone on too long, it was time to shut it down. "So can I see him, or what?" And without waiting for an answer, he pushed past the doctor towards the open door.

----

The room was small and quiet, and Dean slipped inside silently, wanting to take stock. Sam was sitting on the bed, shoulders hunched, tense, and he stared right through Dean as he passed, and somehow that freaked Dean out as much as all the nightmare scenarios he'd been imagining in the waiting room. He knew he should announce his presence, but somehow he just couldn't bear to, and so he found himself studying his little brother, feeling oddly voyeuristic, until his foot hit the bedframe with a too-loud clatter. Sam jumped, and was instantly on his feet, turning his head from side to side, hands raised in front of him. "Who's there?" he said.

Dean reacted instinctively, reaching for him, wanting to reassure him, but the touch of his hand on Sam's wrist only made the younger man jump backwards like he had been burned, and Dean realised what he should have realised a fraction of a second before and said, "It's OK, Sam, it's me."

Sam's shoulders relaxed, and he turned in the direction of Dean's voice, his eyes open very wide, looking like he was straining to see.

"Anything coming back?" Dean asked, and Sam put out his arms, fumbling in the direction of the bed. Dean darted quickly forward, trying to help him, but Sam shrugged off the touch and, somehow, managed by himself.

"No," he sighed. "No outlines, no light and shadow, nothing." He looked down at his feet, or at least, he directed his eyes that way. "It's just... dark. Like someone turned out the lights."

Dean sat down next to him. _Like flipping a switch_. "What'd the doctor say?"

"That he didn't know what was wrong with me. That he wanted to keep me overnight for observation."

"Huh," Dean said, knowing Sam would catch on to the slight surprise in his tone. He wasn't disappointed – his brother raised his head and turned his face towards Dean. "What?"

"Nothing," Dean said, knowing what reaction that would get, too.

Sam frowned. "Seriously, Dean. What?"

Dean raised his eyebrows slightly and shifted as if he was uncomfortable, then wondered why he was going through this physical theatre when Sam couldn't possibly appreciate it. "Just... doctor told _me_ you were a couple pancakes short of a stack."

He grinned at the sudden look of annoyance on his brother's face. _Every time_. "Course, I didn't tell him you're just naturally a fruit loop. Thought that would be kinda indiscreet." He dodged out of the way of the flailing blow Sam threw at him, and was both glad he did and oddly ashamed: glad because Sam had swiped harder than he probably thought he had, and ashamed because it wasn't fair, taking advantage of his disability. Sam rolled his eyes and lay down on his back on the bed. Dean settled into a chair and put his feet up on the table.

"So you wanna go back to the motel?" he asked.

"I don't know," Sam said, eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. "Maybe I _should_ stay in for observation."

Dean snorted. "Damn doctors don't know what they're talking about."

"Maybe," said Sam slowly, and there was that _tone_ in his voice, the one that Dean hated because he could never figure out what it meant in time to stop Sam hurting, could never make it go away. "Did the doctor really think I was just making it up?"

"What'd I just say?" Dean scoffed. "You'd think six years in school'd teach em something, but they ain't got half a brain between em. Mind you," he continued, "not like all that time in school did much good for your common sense either."

Sam ignored this. There was a long silence, during which Dean began to wonder if there was anything good on the TV perched in the corner of the room, and then Sam said, "Dean. What did it look like?"

"Huh?" Dean asked, though he knew what Sam meant. He just wasn't sure he wanted to reply.

"The creature. Was it a spirit?"

Dean watched him for a moment, then looked away. "I didn't see it."

"But you shot it."

Dean shook his head. "No. It must have been gone when I got there."

Sam shook his head, too, mimicking the gesture that he couldn't have seen. "No," he said firmly. "I saw you. You were the last thing... while it still had its hands on me."

"Oh." Dean had been worried that might be it. "Well, then it's invisible."

Sam sighed. "Great. That's all we need."

----

In the end, they did stay overnight, because Sam fell asleep on top of the covers and Dean thought one characterless room was as good as any other, since Mr. Granville surely had enough credit to pay for an overnight hospital stay. He didn't like to wake Sam up when he was sleeping these days. Wasn't like he did a lot of it.

Of course, the hospital chairs were not the most comfortable places to sleep, but Dean didn't intend to sleep anyway. Sam was in here for observation: he intended to _observe_.

Whatever it was that had attacked Sam had been invisible. That meant identifying it was going to be a tough job, not to mention tracking it down. On the other hand, not too many things that went bump in the night were into attacking while invisible, so that would narrow the field down a little. The whole brain thing was weird too – usually, if something was interested in your brain, it was because it wanted to eat it or wear it or whatever, not turn it off. An image suddenly flashed into Dean's brain of an invisible science student, complete with thick glasses and pocket protector, reaching for some biological switch and saying, 'I wonder what'll happen if I do _this_.'

But the image didn't make him smile, because the thing, whatever it was, knew what would happen, had done it many times before and presumably witnessed the results. And because it had tried to do it to Sammy.

He leafed through his father's journal in the small hours, glancing every now and then at Sam's sleeping form, scrutinising each page for clues as if he hadn't read them all a hundred times before. And when the drizzly night became a drizzly, grey morning, he was no closer to the answers than he had been hours before.

Sam turned over, muttered something, and opened his eyes. Dean watched him closely.

"Dean? You awake?" Fair question. The morning light falling through the small window was not exactly bright sunshine, and Dean was in the shadows on the other side of the bed.

"Yeah."

"Timesit?" Sam asked sleepily.

Dean consulted his watch. "Seven forty-eight."

Sam blinked, then sat up sharply. He held his hand in front of his eyes, waved it a couple of times, then covered his face with it.

Dean let his shoulders slump slightly. After all, there was no-one to see. "No change?"

Sam shook his head.

They were both silent for a moment, and then Dean sighed, shrugged, and stood up. "Come on, dude," he said, laying a hand on his brother's shoulder. "Let's blow this popsicle stand."

----

They didn't bother going to find the doctors – it wasn't like Dean had seen them doing any observing anyway – and Sam walked down the corridor trailing one hand along the wall. Dean tried to support him on the other side, but Sam pushed him away and so he had to be content with warning his brother about obstacles and, when he could, moving them out of the way.

They were almost to the elevator when a woman came suddenly out of a doorway and Dean walked straight into her. _Great. The blind leading the blind_. He considered making the joke out loud, wondered if Sam would find it funny, if it'd piss him off, or if it'd just make him turn inwards. And realised that Sam had stopped, standing looking worried, had heard the collision but didn't know what had happened. Was stretching out an arm into the thin air of the corridor, trying to find Dean.

"Sorry, ma'am," Dean said loudly, stepping quickly over and touching the back of his brother's hand and thinking he was going to have to get better at this, at anticipating how Sam would react. "Wasn't looking where I was going." _Looking where_ he _was going._

"That's no problem, honey," the woman said, and then looked him in the face. "Say, ain't you that guy from the other day? The one who was askin bout young Tommy Gardner?"

It was the same nurse, the one who was such a useful source on their previous trip. Dean flashed her a smile. "Why yes ma'am I am. How is young Tommy?"

"Oh, it's a dreadful thing," the nurse said, and Dean had to fight not to roll his eyes. _Yeah, yeah. Horrible. Awful. I get it._ Behind her head, Sam was looking intently at Dean. _Looked_ like he was looking intently.

"No change then?" Dean asked, preparing to cut this conversation off too, wanting to get his brother _out_ of that damn hospital with its lurking smell of disease that actually reminded him of the rotten smell of the forest.

"Oh, didn't you hear, child? They put that boy on a ventilator last night. He just done stopped breathing."

Dean blinked once, and looked at Sam. Yup. Definitely time to get out of the hospital.

----

Luckily the Impala was parked near the main doors, and there were no dangerous roads to cross, no playing chicken with cars trying to find a parking spot. Dean could tell that Sam was thinking, and that was a dangerous thing, because he suspected that Sam was thinking about the same thing that Dean was trying very hard _not_ to think about. And he knew that eventually, Sam would want to talk about it.

_Eventually_ turned out to be as Dean was trying to negotiate the car out of the lot. Not the best of times, but then Sam wasn't exactly gifted when it came to picking his moments.

"Dean-"

"Not now, Sammy."

"God, why do you _do_ that?"

Dean raised an eyebrow, glanced over to see Sam slumped sulkily in the passenger seat, staring sightlessly out through the windshield. "Do what?"

"Cut me off. You don't even know what I was going to say."

"Yeah I do." Dean concentrated on manoeuvring round a particularly badly-parked SUV. "You're not exactly Captain Unpredictable."

Sam didn't say anything for a moment, but Dean could feel him glowering even without looking. _See, Sammy? You don't need eyes. Just as long as no-one ever does anything unpredictable near you again. _

Ten minutes later, Sam tried again. "Tommy-"

"Tommy probably had a real stroke this time," Dean said, sounding more confident than he felt. "Weak Scandinavian brain and all that jazz."

"What if he didn't?"

"He did," Dean said, and leaned forward to turn up the music.

----

By the time they arrived back in the motel room, Dean was sure he was not cut out for this. The nearest parking was across the street, a quiet, small-town street, and yet Sam had stumbled on the kerb and at the doorsill because Dean hadn't told him they were there, hadn't even noticed them, his subconscious processing them without bothering to let the rest of his brain in on it. He guided his brother to an armchair and sighed with relief once he was safe inside its embrace. The relief didn't last long, however.

"Dean, listen, you've really got to face up to this, man."

Dean, who had been fixing Sam a drink, like he used to back in the old days, didn't turn round. "Yeah, I know," he said. "I've been trying to deny it, but it's true. My brother really _is_ the biggest dork on the planet."

He heard Sam's breath explode in exasperation. "I'm _serious_. If Tommy stopped breathing because of being attacked, that could be a really important piece of evidence. It could help us work out what it is, how to kill it."

Dean shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. Every other time the thing's just killed and been done. Tommy survives and then – what? It breaks into the hospital to finish the job? Only it doesn't quite manage it this time either?"

Sam shook his head slowly, accepting the glass that Dean put into his hand without acknowledgement, just like he used to. "No – it stays in the woods, that's pretty certain. But maybe whatever it did could trigger some kind of, I don't know, deterioration."

"Yeah, like I told you, weak Scandinavian brains."

And that was all he would say on the subject.

----

For the first day, Sam just sat in the chair. Dean did as much research as he could without leaving the room, though it made his head buzz and his eyes feel like they were full of fine sand. Sometimes he asked for Sam's advice on how to perform internet searches he was perfectly capable of doing himself. Sometimes Sam surprised him, came up with a new idea, a new place to look. But mostly he was no particular use, though the moment that thought popped into Dean's head he squashed it down with a flash of guilt, because he knew, could tell from Sam's expression as he sat, unfocussed eyes staring at nothing, long-fingered hands fidgeting on his lap, that that was what he was telling himself. _No use. Useless._

What Dean really wanted to do was go out there, into the woods, and hunt the bastard down. He'd almost done it once or twice, too, got up and headed for the door, but Sam's head had turned at the sound and he'd remembered that there was no way he could leave Sammy, not like this. And he couldn't take him with him. Didn't even dare take him outside, where there were kerbstones and door sills.

So for the first day, Sam just sat in the chair.

On the second day, Dean awoke, his head resting on the desk beside the laptop, whose screensaver glowed softly in the dim room, and hoped that maybe today, Sam would wake up and be able to see. Except Sam wasn't in the bed, he was still sitting in the chair, curled up with his eyes closed, and Dean cursed himself for falling asleep without helping his brother first. But when Sam woke up at the slight sound of Dean pushing back his chair from the table and looked at Dean and Dean knew without asking that he couldn't see him and started to apologise, Sam frowned and told him in that prissy, offended tome of his that he was quite capable of getting to bed himself, thank you, he had just fallen asleep in the chair unexpectedly. And Dean almost – _almost_ – believed him.

There was no more research he could do here. And he was left with a problem – he couldn't leave Sam, but he couldn't fix Sam without leaving.

But in the end, Sam solved the problem himself.

----

Dean turned off the water and got out of the shower, wrapping a towel round his waist and trying to think of some lame joke he could tell Sam that would make him smile. He had just about come up with a pun involving a psychic chicken when he opened the bathroom door and stopped, all thoughts of humour dropping straight out of his mind.

Sam was gone.

"Sam?" Dean stepped fully into the room, wheeling round, checking he wasn't there. Then he grabbed the nearest gun and marched straight for the door, his jaw set.

He found Sam outside, a short way from the room, sitting on a bench in the wan sunlight that had broken through the seemingly eternal drizzle the afternoon before. He stared at him furiously.

"Jesus Christ, Sam, what the hell dyou think you're doing?"

Sam looked around at the sound. "Sunbathing," he said, infuriatingly calm.

"You could have been killed!" Dean yelled, not caring about a passerby who stared nervously at the guy standing on a motel forecourt wearing nothing but a towel, waving a shotgun and haranguing an innocent-looking kid on a bench.

Sam sighed. "I'm not totally helpless, you know," he said, and something in his tone made Dean lower his arms. "I just wanted to get out of that damn chair. Outside."

Dean could understand that. Sam, who didn't really like TV and didn't care about music, had had to sit and listen to Dean read, and be reminded that he could not. "You could have asked," he said, sitting down next to his brother on the bench. "You should have asked."

"I knew you'd say no," Sam said simply. Then he grinned. "Besides, the most likely thing to kill me so far has been that shotgun going off in my face."

Dean looked at the shotgun, then at Sam's unseeing eyes. "How did you-"

"Hey," Sam's grin broadened, "you're not exactly Captain Unpredictable yourself."

"Shut up," said Dean.

"Dude, are you wearing a towel?"

"I said shut up, dickweed."

----

Dean took Sam to the library with him, because Sam asked him to. He didn't understand why Sam would want to sit in a room full of books that he couldn't read rather than sit in the sunshine, but he was happy because it meant he didn't have to leave him alone. After a few hours of research that turned up nothing they didn't already know and left him feeling frustrated and angry, he crossed over to Sam's table to find him running his fingers over the pages of a book with no words in it.

"What're you doing?" he asked, genuinely perplexed.

"Trying to learn Braille."

Dean stared. "Why?"

Sam sighed. "We've got to adjust, Dean. What if this is-- what if we can't get it back?"

Dean reached over and closed the book. "We're going to get it back."

----

Over the course of that day and the next, Dean got better at guiding his brother. He was surprised at how quickly it became second nature – _step, Sammy, road, Sammy, here we are, Sammy_. After the first fifty times, Sam gave up complaining about the nickname. Sometimes Dean would reach out and gently readjust his trajectory, and Sam's jaw would tighten, but he wouldn't complain.

Sam wondered out loud if he should get a cane, and maybe some shades. Make it easier for people to see he was coming, get out of the way. Make it easier for him to probe his surroundings.

Dean refused to countenance the idea. That would be _adjusting_.

Everything was very slow. Dean felt his legs itching to stride (_through the woods, with a shotgun_), but he had to walk slowly to keep up with Sam's shuffling steps. He could only imagine what it must be like for him, with his longer legs. Dean, after all, got to stretch his legs a little pacing the motel room, and running to the convenience store for food, which he had agreed to do after protestations from Sam that really he could handle being on his own for _ten minutes_. He did actually run, though, both to stretch his legs and to get back quicker.

And the major problem still hadn't been solved: how was he going to fix this? Convenience store runs were one thing, but there was no way he was abandoning Sam to go running off round the woods. Especially not given he still didn't know how to kill the creature in question. Especially not given that if he got hurt, if he didn't come back, Sam would be helpless.

_I'm not totally helpless_.

No. Not totally.

----

"Can't you, like, use the force to see or something?" Dean said on the evening of the third day, flicking through the channels on the battered old TV.

"I probably could, if I lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," Sam said pointedly, sipping his coffee.

"I'm serious." Dean looked round at his brother, raising his eyebrows. He hadn't thought of it before, had been hoping, _assuming_ Sam's sight would come back on its own or they would work out how to make the creature give it back. "I mean, you see things, right?"

Sam looked tired. "Yeah, sometimes. But not things right here and now. That's why they call it _Second_ Sight."

Dean turned back to the TV. "Have you even tried?" he asked, trying not to sound pissed. _Do you even care at all, Sam? Do you_ want _to be like this forever or something?_

There was a long, pained silence from behind him, and then Sam said softly, "Yes."

The local news came on then, and drained Dean's brain of any comebacks.

Tommy Gardner was dead.

----

Dean didn't sleep that night. He didn't know if Sam did or not – sure, the kid closed his eyes and lay on his bed, but who knew if he was really sleeping? At 5 a.m., he went to get them breakfast.

Sam was in the chair when Dean came back and handed him his food. It turned out he was perfectly capable of moving around the room by himself, after all.

"Jeez, Sam, you look like crap," Dean breezed, too cheerful, sounding false even to himself.

"Thanks, dude," Sam said. "I'm sure you look like Brad Pitt."

"Hey, Brad's got nothing on me," Dean said, and was rewarded with a smile and an eye-roll as Sam sipped his drink and then made a face.

"Didn't you get me coffee?" he asked, looking confused.

"Sure did, sunshine," Dean said, not really paying attention.

"Then why--" Sam stopped suddenly. Dean looked up.

"What?"

"Nothing," Sam said, setting his cup carefully on the table. He took a bite of his sandwich, and Dean felt alarm rise in his belly as Sam almost choked on it.

"Sam? What's wrong?"

Sam managed to swallow the mouthful of sandwich, though the face he made as it went down spoke volumes. "Nothing, really, it's fine."

Dean shook his head. "Oh no, college boy, you're not getting away with it that easy."

Sam swallowed again, just saliva this time. He was quiet for a long time, long enough for Dean's heartbeat to start sounding like the loudest damn thing he'd ever heard. Then he said, "It doesn't taste of anything."

Dean reached over and grabbed the coffee, sniffed it, tasted it, his heart still thumping. It was perfectly ordinary coffee. A little strong, even.

"You're sure," he said. A statement, not a question, but Sam nodded anyway.

----

An hour later, outside the door of their room, Dean pressed the speed-dial on his phone and waited for the inevitable voice-mail message to end.

"Dad," he said, "We're in Fremont, Minnesota, and Sammy's in trouble. He got attacked by – something, and we can't find out what it is. It's getting worse, dad. I thought I'd better call you, before..." He didn't finish the sentence, but snapped the phone closed.

It started to drizzle again.


	3. Chapter 3

Supernatural and the boys are in no way mine. Many thanks to empath89, laughandlove, Sandy Murray, Darktales, carocali, charmed1of2, Thru Terry's Eyes, imbreena, and Onari for their kind reviews.

Thru Terry's Eyes: I won't ignore you -- I like concrit! Glad to hear the plot isn't a problem. I totally get the whole kerb/curb thing, I get kind of freaked out when I run across the American spelling too. Hopefully there won't be any more of them to trip you -- or Sam -- up ;).

**---- **

**Sensory Deprivation 3**

At first, Dean hoped his father might call back quickly. For the first two hours, the phone stayed in his hand as he paced around the motel room, until finally Sam said _Dean, God, would you just sit down already?_ and Dean froze mid-pace because he had forgotten that Sam was there, that he was still present in the room despite his unfocussed eyes. Or maybe he hadn't forgotten. Maybe he had just _discounted_ him.

Dean dropped into the chair opposite Sam and glared at the uneaten sandwiches, as if they could somehow relieve his feeling of guilt if he could just get them to move with pure brainpower. Except that was Sam's department.

"You should eat something," he said.

Sam grimaced, but reached out obediently, fumbling along the edge of the table until his fingers hit soft bread. He chewed grimly and swallowed, and Dean could tell he was trying to hide his distaste. Wasn't doing a very good job of it.

"What kind of sandwich is it?" Sam asked. Stalling.

"Turkey," Dean said. "What does it taste like?" Helping him stall.

Sam made a face, and Dean noticed that even though his eyes didn't see, they still had life and emotion in them. It wasn't the first time he had noticed it, but it was the first time it had really sunk in, that he had looked in his brother's eyes and seen not sightlessness but _Sam_.

"Cardboard," Sam said, fingering the sandwich gingerly. "Or, like, you know those polystyrene things you get for packing stuff in? Like that."

Dean wanted to say something to make it better, but he didn't. "Remind me not to take you out for a steak dinner until this is over."

Sam made another face, a more familiar one this time, and said, "It's not like you take me out for steak dinners _anyway_."

"Eat your sandwich," Dean said, and moved to sit on the bed because he didn't want to watch how difficult the sandwich was for Sam.

All in all, though, this loss was easier to cope with than the last one. Dean could alleviate it by buying yoghurts and soup (_he didn't remember if he'd ever bought a yoghurt before, but he suspected he had not_), which Sam would find easier to swallow than more robust foods. It was no diet to go hunting on, but then, it didn't look like Sam was going hunting any time soon. When he got back from the convenience store this time, it was broad daylight outside, and he paused on the threshold, swallowing down his fear that when he entered, Sam would have lost something else.

But Sam was the same. A little cranky because Dean had made him finish the sandwich before having the yoghurt brainwave. But then, cranky was normal, for Sam. Normal.

----

"Dean?"

Dean was sitting on the bed, cleaning his guns again. He felt restless, but there was no way he was going back to the library. There was nothing more to find. The books, the internet, that vast store of knowledge, they had given him nothing that could fix his brother, and now he was torn between waiting for dad to call and going out there and grabbing that thing by its invisible balls and dragging it back to the motel and _making_ it fix Sam.

"What?"

"Are you scared?"

Dean laughed. "Don't be such a little bitch." But he was, of course. It seemed to him that he was much more scared than Sam himself. Sam just seemed to take it in his stride, the way that Dean always pretended to. Maybe Sam was pretending as well.

----

Around midday, Sam stood up. "I'm going for a walk," he announced. "You can come, if you want."

Dean shot to his feet. "Say what now?"

But Sam was already making his way slowly around the table, around the furniture that Dean had been so careful not to move an inch after Sam had fallen over a chair the first time. His movements were cautious, but there was nothing hesitant about them any more. Dean could do nothing but follow.

----

They walked an easy route, along a straight, flat sidewalk between two rows of painted houses. Cookie-cutter houses. Boring. They reminded him of the house in Lawrence.

A few people were around, strolling with their dogs or their children. At first, Dean concentrated on telling Sam about indentations and side-roads and places where the paving was uneven, but it didn't take long for him to realise that the children and the dogs were much more dangerous, much more unpredictable. The first time Sam stumbled, it was a little girl who had appeared out of nowhere and tangled herself somehow between his legs. She stared up at him as he reached out, fumbling, and felt the top of her head, then crouched and looked sort of in the right direction and asked her her name.

The little girl just stared, the curious stare of children who didn't know what was socially acceptable (_look who's talking, Dean_), until Dean growled at her and she ran back to her mother, screaming _Mommy, mommy, there's something wrong with that man's eyes!_ and then Dean had to endure the sidelong, curious glances of adults who thought they did know the social rules, and he glared back at them so they looked hastily away.

The second time, Sam tripped over the extendible lead of a spaniel that raced out in front of them before Dean had time to see it, and would have fallen if Dean hadn't caught his arm. The dog yelped, and the owner stormed up, demanding to know what they thought they were doing. Dean was boiling mad, ready to throw a punch, but Sam smiled apologetically at the man and explained that he was blind, and the man stuttered and backed down, staring in horrified fascination at Sam's eyes, and hurried off with his dog in tow, trailing apologies.

It wasn't the first time Sam had been able to defuse a situation or get them what they wanted by the sheer openness of his manner. But this time it was no act, and the word echoed in Dean's head, _blind_. It hadn't even occurred to him that that was what Sam was, not since back in the hospital when this had all seemed like a temporary setback. It wasn't just that he couldn't see. He was _blind_. He wondered what the word for Sam's other, more recent disability was. _Tasteless?_

There was a joke in there somewhere.

----

It was the word _blind_ that led to Dean almost throwing Sam into the passenger seat of the Impala and standing on the gas, racing out towards that line of crosses that mocked him from the map that Sam could no longer read for him. But it was another word that pulled him back to the car, to a silent, morose Sam, after an hour or so of fruitless wandering, pointing the shotgun at shadows and growling out loud.

That word was _stupid_.

----

When they got back from the woods, the silence between them had stretched out, long and unbroken. Dean called every number in his cell-phone memory (well, all those that didn't belong to girls he'd met in bars, anyway), asking if anyone had heard of this, knew where it was documented, knew how to kill it.

After an hour or two, he was seriously contemplating starting on the girls, as well.

No-one had anything more than the vaguest idea that they might have heard about it somewhere sometime, that they would look it up, that he should call them back, that he should call his dad. The last one made him bite back a sharp retort. _Whyn't you call your dad, Dean? If anyone knows anything about it, he will_.

Dean almost did call his dad again, for the second time in twenty-four hours. But he knew that would be pointless. Dad had his message. He would call if he wanted to.

When he got back inside (because he had made his calls from out in front of the motel, drizzle be damned, not wanting Sam to hear the tones in his voice), his brother was sitting at the table, reading.

Dean stopped dead in the doorway and stared. No, it was definitely true. Sam was hunched over an open book, too absorbed to even hear the door open. He cleared his throat. "Sam?" he said cautiously, "whatcha doin?"

Sam jerked and looked up, a flash of shame on his face. "Ah, ah," he stuttered, "nothing. Just wanted a change of scene is all."

Dean strode across the room, snatching the book up from the table. "Were you reading this, Sam?" he asked, his voice dangerously calm.

Sam shook his head. "No."

Dean flung the book across the room and grabbed hold of his brother's chin, forcing his head up, staring into his eyes. "Can you _see_?"

He thought he caught a flicker of something, thought Sam's eyes rested on his, just for a moment. _Goddammit, Sammy. Are you a fruitcake like the doc said? Are you making this up? _Visions of the shit he'd been through in the past few days rose to his mind, and he swung. Hard.

Sam staggered back, but came out fighting. It was only after the third punch had missed him without Dean even trying to dodge that he realised he might have made a mistake. He grabbed Sam's wrist, opened his mouth to call a truce.

And that was when Sam cracked him right across the jaw, and he fell backwards, tripping over a chair (_damn chairs were a health hazard_) and hitting the floor, seeing stars dancing between him and the ceiling.

First thought: _ouch_.

Second thought: _I am _so_ gonna kick your ass for that, you little punk_.

Third thought: _Jesus, what the hell was I thinking?_

Sam was standing very still, his hands up in front of him. Listening, Dean realised.

"Dean? Where are you?"

Dean clambered to his feet. At least Sam hadn't seen how he'd knocked him on his ass. He would never have heard the end of that. "Right here," he said.

Sam tensed a little more, if that was even possible. "You gonna hit me again?" he asked.

Dean closed his eyes and shook his head. "No."

Sam sighed, and his shoulders relaxed. "I'm sorry."

_Jesus_. Why did those words always seem to come so easy to him? Even when he had nothing to be sorry for. Even when it was Dean who should be sorry, Dean who found the words choked him every time. _I'm sorry_. Such an emo thing to say. And if Dean knew one thing for sure, it was that _he_ was not emo.

Sam must have interpreted his silence as accusatory, because he put his hands over his face and blurted, "I just thought if I could _stare_ at it long enough, you know, maybe I would start to see the words. I'm just so _sick_ of being stuck here in the dark."

Dean stepped forward and grabbed his shoulder. "Hey. No need for apologies." _Not from you, anyway_. "It was just a misunderstanding." _Stuck in the dark. _"You should sit down."

"I'm always sitting down," Sam said mulishly, but he sank onto the bed anyway. "Is my lip bleeding?"

Dean peered at his face. "Open your mouth." There was blood in it, not much, but enough. Sam couldn't taste it, Dean remembered.

"Cracked you a good one, huh?" he said, trying to sound like he was grinning.

"Shut up," Sam said, feeling his face. "I totally laid you out."

"Did not."

Sam snorted. "Think I can't hear it when six feet of asshole falls over a chair?" He sounded amused. Dean raised his eyebrows, finding that he actually was grinning now.

"Whatever, dude, like I'd hit you properly when you're like this anyway. It'd be like hitting a girl. Even more than usual." Dean rubbed the side of his jaw, which was starting to ache. "And I'm six one."

"Jerk."

"Bitch."

"Jackass."

Silence. But the good kind, mostly.

"Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"You need to get back to work."

Dean frowned. Sometimes he really had trouble following his brother's thought-processes. "Huh?"

"I know you think you've got to stay here with me, but honestly, I can manage by myself for a while. This isn't how a hunt is supposed to be."

_Don't I know it_.

But somehow, spurred on by the realisation that Sam wasn't just going to give up, he found himself leaving the room the next morning, not sure what he was looking for yet, but sure he wasn't going to find it staring at the peeling motel wallpaper. Sam was right. It was time to get proactive.

----

Hours later, he was back, feeling more cheerful than he had for days. He had managed to wheedle a young woman at the police records desk into giving him a copy of the police report on Tommy Gardner. There was something in it, something the moustache-guy hadn't told them. He had something new to go on at last.

He breezed into the motel room and went straight for the laptop. "Guess what, psychic boy?"

Sam didn't answer, and Dean glanced over at the chair, wondering if he was asleep. But no, his eyes were open, and his long fingers were fiddling with a paperclip. "Sam? You OK?"

Still no response. Dean frowned, walking over to the chair. "Hey, Sam, you listening or what?" He put his hand on his brother's shoulder.

Sam leapt out of the seat like he was on fire, staggering backwards. "Who's there?"

Dean stared in amazement, though somewhere deep down the pieces slipped into place. "Dude, it's me. Dean."

Sam's eyes were swivelling wildly back and forth, and his hands reached out, fumbling for something, and before Dean had a chance to see what he was going for, Sam had picked it up and pointed it at Dean's chest and Dean knew they had a problem.

"Sammy," he said quietly, though by now he was pretty certain Sam couldn't hear him. "Put the shotgun down."

Sam waved the barrel from side to side, backing up against the wall, edging towards the door. The shotgun was an old fashioned double-barrel, only two shots, and he wasn't going to waste one of them when he wasn't sure where – or what – his target was. Sometimes, Dean really had trouble following his little brother's thought-processes. This was not one of those times.

"Sam," he said, knowing now that he was wasting his time. Wondering what would happen if he stepped forward and grabbed his brother by the shoulders. Imagining what the shotgun blast would do to him at such short range. What Sam would do afterwards.

This called for some diplomacy, Dean Winchester-style.

He flung himself at Sam's waist, letting his encircling arms slip down and wrap around Sam's ankles. Sam toppled forward, hitting his head on the doorframe that was so dangerously close, the shotgun jolting out of his grasp and skidding across the floor. Sam kicked Dean in the face and started to struggle after it, but Dean wasn't letting him get away with that. He crawled over Sam, pulling his body across the floor under him, grabbing handfuls of clothing, pinning his brother with his full weight. Sam struggled under him, grunted, and then Dean turned him over and grabbed his hands and put them in his hair.

For a moment, Sam gripped so tightly that Dean's eyes watered. Then, he stopped struggling, and his hands moved down over Dean's face, feeling along his brows, his lips. It was a weird feeling, but Dean stayed as still as he could.

Finally, Sam moved one hand down to Dean's neck and found the amulet that always hung there, irregular and unmistakeable. Then he breathed out slowly.

"Dean," he said, "I think I've gone deaf."

_----_

At first, Sam didn't talk at all. For the first hour or two after the shotgun incident, he just sat in the armchair and frowned, while Dean sat on the bed with his head in his hands and swore to himself that he was never leaving his brother alone again.

After that, Sam talked a whole lot.

----

It started simply enough. With a name.

"Dean."

"Yeah?" Dean said without thinking, then got up and went over, touching Sam's shoulder lightly.

"I've had an idea."

"What's that, Sammy?" Dean murmured, because it felt too weird not to speak.

"God, this is weird, you know? I can't hear myself talking. I don't even know if I _am_ talking. I don't know if you can hear me. But if you can, tap me on the right shoulder."

Dean reached out and tapped.

There was a long pause.

"...OK, that was my left shoulder, but I'm gonna assume that that wasn't deliberate."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Geek."

"OK, so my idea is that I can ask you questions and you can tap me on the shoulder, one tap for yes, two for no. Got it?"

"That's your great idea? Jesus, that's pathetic," said Dean, and tapped once.

"Good," Sam said, smiling excitedly. "OK, so, did you get the police report like I said?"

One tap.

"Did you find out anything new?"

One tap.

"What did you find out?"

Dean closed his eyes. "For God's sake." He tapped fifteen times on Sam's shoulder, just to mess with him.

Sam's smile turned into a frown. "Shut up," he said.

Dean wondered what the tap-symbol for _this system needs a bigger vocabulary_ was. Sam leaned back in the chair and sighed.

"It's not perfect," he said, as if replying to his brother's thought, "but it'll have to do."

And that's when Sam started talking.

It was as if, now that almost all his avenues to the outside world were cut off, he needed to feel a continuing connection with it. At first, he reminded Dean of various times in their childhood and over the last year or so, laughed at old jokes, recited information about various creatures that Dean knew all about and some that he didn't. Dean found it annoying, and distracting, and as necessary as oxygen. Sometimes he would hold whole conversations with his brother that almost made sense. Often he would reach over from where he sat at the table and lay a hand on his head or shoulder, let him touch the amulet, just to reassure him. Reassure them both.

Once, Dean went to have a shower and when he came back, Sam was talking to thin air. He didn't know how to tell him he had been gone. He wished he had let Sam learn that goddamn Braille thing or whatever, though it would still have been useless since Dean didn't know it and didn't know how to write it. Didn't even know if it was written at all.

The next day, Sam's subject matter changed. He started talking about Stanford, and Dean learned more about those missing four years of his brother's life that day than he had in all the preceding year and change of living cheek by jowl with him. He learned that, although Sam had been pre-law, his favourite class had been anthropology (_that lawyer shit never did suit you anyway. Though studying anthropops doesn't sound much more entertaining_). That he had once (_only once? You're kidding me, right?_) got drunk on tequila and puked all over his own shoes. That he had told people he met in his first week of freshmen year that his father and brother worked as mechanics (_well we do, sometimes_), and that some of them had looked at him like he was dirt (_just think what they would have said if you'd told em the truth. And then fed them to a werewolf_).

At some point during the morning, he mentioned casually that he thought he might have lost his sense of smell, and Dean felt like throwing up.

They had worked out tap-sequences for 'danger' and 'all-clear'. Dean wasn't quite sure how they had done it, but they had. Dean had put a knife and a gun next to Sam's chair, and lifted his brother's hand, laying it on them, so he would know they were there if he needed them. Sam had looked at something beside Dean's left ear and nodded.

Sam seemed to find it slightly more difficult to move around the room after his hearing loss than before. Dean didn't know why that was, because one thing Sam didn't talk about, didn't mention at all, was what it was like for him in there, stuck inside his body as it slowly shut down. Dean didn't ask him. He couldn't have even if he had wanted to.

----

"And then Rory said--"

"Oh, Rory, Rory, Rory," Dean muttered. "Can we change the frickin subject please?" He felt like he knew all of Sam's Stanford friends personally by now. Some of them he liked, some he didn't. Rory definitely fell into the latter category.

Sam snorted with laughter. "...and it was like, dude, come _on_, you believed in the tooth fairy till you were fourteen?"

"Actually, I saw a tooth fairy once," Dean reminisced. "Ugly little fucker."

"...but I had a paper due the next day so I guess I missed whatever happened next."

Dean rolled his eyes. Typical. Sit through a whole goddamn story in which _Rory_ was a main character and then find that Sam had dorked out before the punchline. "You know," he said, "sometimes I wonder how you ever got a girlfriend at all."

That was weird. Sam hadn't interrupted him.

He thought for a moment that Sam's hearing had come back, that he had heard what his brother said and was sulking. The hope only lasted the split second it took to look over at Sam's chair and see him gesturing at his throat, his mouth opening and shutting like a goldfish but no sound coming out. And it was only another split second before Dean was kneeling in front of him, holding him by the shoulders and telling him it was OK, hoping somehow to wipe the panic-stricken expression off his face.

And it wasn't long after that, when Sam's breathing had evened out and Dean's death-grip on his shoulders had loosened somewhat, that there was a knock on the door.

Dean was on his feet, tapping out danger, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam reach for the knife. _Good boy_. He reached the door in two strides, grabbing a .45 on the way. Once there, he stood with his back flat against the wall, ready for whatever might be there, reaching for the door handle.

On the step stood a man wearing a leather coat and a tired look. "Hello, Dean."

Dean dropped the gun. "Dad," he said.


	4. Chapter 4

Supernatural and its characters are not mine.

Thanks are due to bally2cute, MistressHolbytla, empath89, daisymaygirl1, Carikube, Phx, Thru Terry's Eyes, Onari and friendly for their kind reviews, and to everyone who's been reading along.

----

**Sensory Deprivation 4**

His father stepped forward to embrace Dean, and Dean wanted nothing more than to collapse into that hug, to cling to his father's chest and cry like a baby. But Sam was waiting, knife in hand, waiting in the dark. And Dean wasn't about to let him wait any longer.

He pushed his father away, ignoring the hurt in the older man's eyes, and took the quick two steps back to the chair. Sam had folded his long legs up in front of him so he was not visible from behind, and was holding the knife in a classic defensive posture. Dean clenched his jaw and tapped out the all clear signal. Sam didn't move, but his hand grabbed Dean's arm and moved up it to his chest, to the amulet. Only when he felt it did he relax – well, slightly, anyway – and stretch out his legs again, laying the knife down.

"I thought you said Sammy was in trouble?"

Dean looked up to see that his father had come to stand in front of Sam's chair, and was leaning in, hugging Sam, squashing Sam's arms up against his chest. Dean scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly feeling exhausted, and opened his mouth to explain, because of course you couldn't tell anything was wrong with Sammy, not just by looking at him, the only thing wrong about his appearance was the fear on his face. But then Sam started struggling, kicking and thrashing, and Dean saw that his hand was pressed against his father's chest, where the amulet would have been if he had worn one.

"Dad, he can't--" Dean started, but his father had already drawn back and was gripping a flailing Sam by the shoulders. Shaking him. Oh God, shaking him.

"Sam, snap out of it, it's me."

And in that instant, Dean was there, ripping his father's hands from his brother's shoulders and pushing him away, glancing behind him only once to make sure that John would get the picture and tapping out the all clear again at the same time. Sam's hand flew forward, striking him in the chest hard enough to hurt, but finding the amulet. He stopped moving, suddenly, but didn't relax. His breathing was heavy, loud in the still room, and Dean saw that he had found the handle of the hunting knife again, was gripping it so hard that his knuckles were white.

"Dean, tell me what's going on." His father's voice was gruff, and Dean couldn't read the tone, but was pretty sure he was about to get bitched out.

"Please," he said, not looking back, because maybe if he didn't look back then he wasn't really defying an order. "Just give me a minute, OK?"

He crouched in front of Sam. _Jesus, this is messed up. I've messed this up_. If Sam felt he couldn't trust him any more, what the hell were they going to do?

"Sammy," he said gently, taking hold of his brother's hand _the one that wasn't holding the knife oh God_ and putting it on his face again, putting it on his lips. "It's OK, Sammy, it's just Dad. He's come to help you." Sam's fingers moved across his brother's mouth, but Dean had no idea if he could tell what he was saying, no idea if that was even possible. He reached out, stroked Sam's bangs away from his sweaty forehead. "Jesus, Sammy, your hair is so fucking ridiculous."

Sam's grip on the knife-handle relaxed slightly, and Dean knew that was all he could hope for. For now.

----

When the explanations were over, John Winchester wanted to see the research immediately, wanted to trawl through it, to find what Dean had missed. Dean shook his head slowly, aware that so far he had escaped recriminations (_you're supposed to protect your brother, Dean. And now look at him_), aware that it was only a matter of time before they started, but aware also that there was something they had to do first.

Gently, he put his hand on Sam's shoulder, waiting for the inevitable touch on his face (because Sam was no longer convinced by just the amulet, and hadn't let go of the hunting knife in the entire time his father had been here), and then carefully took his brother's hand and beckoned his father over, laying the hand on the older man's face.

Sam's entire body tensed, and his grip on the knife-handle tightened. Slowly, he explored his father's features, his hair, the rough salt-and-pepper beard. John looked uncomfortable, but he didn't move a muscle.

Then Sam reached out to the table, fumbling on it, knocking over an empty glass that shattered in the silence, making Dean jump. He grabbed Sam's hand. "What is it, Sammy? What do you need?"

Sam wrenched his hand away and mimed writing, and Dean was across the room and back in a moment, carrying a pen and paper and wondering why hadn't thought of that. _Maybe because two hours ago he could still talk_.

Sam gripped the pen awkwardly in his left hand (his right still occupied with the knife), and drew childish, wobbly letters that ran off the edge of the paper onto the table top.

_Dad?_

Dean closed his eyes as relief washed over him, and tapped once on Sam's shoulder, and then Sam finally, _finally_ let go of the knife and let his shoulders slump, and Dean turned to his father and said, "I guess you can hug him now, sir."

John didn't waste a moment, leaning in and gathering up his youngest son into his arms, stroking the back of his head. "It's OK Sammy," he whispered. "We're going to fix this. I'm going to fix it."

----

At least one of Dean's problems – though nowhere near the biggest one – was that he hadn't left the motel room for over 24 hours, and they were running seriously short on food. He wasn't hungry himself, wasn't even sure he could eat, but he wasn't about to let Sam starve on top of everything else. On the other hand, he wasn't about to leave him alone, either, because it seemed like every time Dean went out, he came back to find another piece of his brother gone. Now that problem, at least, was surmountable.

John wanted Dean to go to the store, wanted to keep going through the research, to find the answers, but Dean refused point-blank. John raised his voice, issued an order, but Dean stood his ground (or rather sat it, since he had been sitting by Sam's side holding his hand for over an hour). He didn't quite know what had got into him, didn't know either why his father was letting him get away with it, but the stand-off ended when Dean tried to let go of his brother's hand and Sam jerked, making an expression that could have been interpreted as terror. As John stalked out, Dean called after him to remember to get yoghurt.

It was quiet in the room after he had gone. Dean reached out to brush back Sam's hair again, and Sam moved his lips as if he was saying something, something like _don't mess with the hair, bitch_, except that that was what Dean would say, not Sammy, and it was so quiet that Dean suddenly wondered if maybe he had gone deaf too.

Sam had always seemed to him to have two basic settings: angsty and silent, which was annoying because damn that kid knew how to do emo, and demanding and needling, which was annoying too because _God_ did he ever shut up? Now he had only one, mute and afraid, and Dean wished that he could just hear Sam telling him he was a jerk or questioning his orders, just once, just once.

The silence in the room seemed to stretch out for ever, and Dean felt as though the walls were closing in. For a moment, he wished he had followed his father's orders and gone outside, into the light and space and air, but then he felt the pressure of Sam's fingers against his and knew that he would never have done that. If he never left his brother's side again, he would be content with that, as long as nothing bad happened to Sammy.

John came back after fifteen minutes that felt like two hours, dumped the bag of groceries in front of Dean and strode straight back to the computer. "What was it the hunter said he heard again?"

Dean fished out a yoghurt and peeled off the foil lid one-handed, which was a difficult manoeuvre. "Something like 'mean new'," he said. His jubilation the previous day over the revelation that the police report contained something new, something that could maybe help, had drained away over 24 hours of searching for what it could mean. He stirred the yoghurt with a spoon, grimacing slightly at the gloopiness of it and trying not to remind himself that it was essentially congealed milk, then lifted the spoon to Sam's lips and tried to get him to open his mouth.

Sam batted his hand away with an exasperated expression, and this time Dean could clearly read what the silent lips said: _God, Dean, I can do it myself_. Dean sighed, but handed the spoon over, and Sam seemed to think for a moment before finally deciding that avoiding humiliation was more important than physical contact, at least for now, and disentangling his hand from Dean's to fumble for the pot. Dean felt the loss of that pressure like a phantom limb.

"Mean new," John muttered, staring at the laptop screen.

Dean looked over, then checked carefully that Sam was managing his food and crossed to stand behind his father.

"What've you got?" he asked.

"Nothing yet," John said, scrolling down a webpage with some particularly gory woodcuts. He thought for a moment. "How long before the first kid... before he..."

"Two days for him to stop breathing," Dean said. "Two or three more before he died."

John nodded. "And Sammy?"

"Six days since the attack," Dean said without pausing to calculate. _Like the information wasn't burned on his brain_. "But it's been getting faster."

"Mean new," muttered John again. "It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe it's in another language?" Dean said hopefully. He had thought of that, but discovered quickly how difficult it was to find these things out. _Damn foreigners and their freaky spelling_.

"Could be," John said, frowning, "but the words are so short. It could be almost any language. I mean, just from what I know it could be Egyptian, Estonian, Old Norse, Galatian..."

"Wait, Old Norse?" Dean said sharply. "As in Scandinavia?"

"Yeah, why?" John had turned, and the look he was giving Dean was burning in intensity.

"The book," Dean said, and shot across the room to Sam's bed, where his brother had been standing when he had unpacked his bag after he came back from the library the day that they had first gone to the woods. _What did you do with the goddamn book, Sammy?_

"Dean?" His father was standing behind him, but Dean didn't answer, just pulled the drawer of the night-table right out so that it crashed on the floor. It was empty, but as it fell it struck the corner of an oblong object peeking out from under the bed.

_Thank God_.

Dean stood, strode round his confused-looking father and slammed the book down on the table. It was a hardback, the spine looking like it had never been cracked, the writing tiny. No pictures.

"Sam said all the local settlers were from Scandinavia," Dean said, flipping through the pages furiously, waiting for something to jump out at him. And then something did.

"There," he said, thrusting the book under his father's nose, open to a map of the endless forests of northern Sweden. "There," he said again, feeling an indescribable sense of relief as he watched the expression on his dad's face, because he knew now that dad was going to fix it, he was going to save them, him and Sammy both. John grabbed the book, reached for the laptop, and then there was a crash from the other side of the room.

Sam was kneeling on the floor, the table overturned, clutching his head. Dean knew what that face meant.

"Sam," he roared, cursing himself for leaving his brother's side again _because you just told yourself you never would, remember that, Dean?_ and crossing the distance between them before he even had time to think it.

"Sammy, what's wrong?" John was there too, his voice urgent, terrified.

"He's having a vision," Dean said, realising that his father had never seen this before, hadn't been there to watch helplessly on previous occasions. "Help me get him on the bed."

Sam's head had just hit the pillow when his eyes opened wide and he stared through Dean, and Dean knew that the vision proper had arrived. He kept his hand on Sam's shoulder, wanting him to know that they were there, that they weren't going to let anything happen. Beside him, he felt his father clench and unclench his fists. Yup, he knew that feeling all right.

He wondered if, in his vision, Sam could see and hear again. Wondered if it was possible to have a vision without sound and light. A touch vision. That would be weird. _Because visions in themselves are totally normal, right?_

After a minute or two, Sam's wandering eyes blinked, he twitched and screwed his face up, and Dean knew it was over. He leaned in, brushing back his brother's hair. "It's OK, Sammy. It's gonna be OK."

John stood still for a moment, and Dean could tell without looking that he was just staring, just staring. Then he heard footsteps, and his father's presence moved about the room and was back, kneeling on Sam's right-hand side, putting a pen into his hand. "What did you see, son?" he said quietly. "Tell us what you saw."

Dean watched as Sam tried to write, but his hand was shaking so much that he dropped the pen. John picked it up patiently and put it back in his hand. Sam dropped it again. After the third time, Dean reached over and grabbed it. "Dad," he said, an edge to his voice. "He can't do it."

His father held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded, dropping his eyes. He stood up, and Dean did too, though he kept hold of his brother's hand. They both looked down at the long, lanky figure lying on the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb, silent as the grave.

"Dad," Dean said, "what does 'mean new' mean in Old Norse?"

John let out a heavy sigh. "It means _mine now_," he said.

----

Sam showed no interest in getting off the bed and going back to the chair after his vision, though his shaking subsided and his headache seemed better, if his expression was anything to go by. Dean wasn't about to make him go anywhere. Wasn't about to go anywhere himself, either. After an hour or so, the pressure on his fingers relaxed: Sam had fallen asleep.

Once they had narrowed down the search to northern Sweden, things had got a whole lot easier. John had been able to find some information on-line, which was good because Dean was pretty sure it would be difficult to get him to go to the library and leave Sam. Finding out what the creature was had taken a while: there were a few mentions in a few medieval sagas, a thing that left lifeless bodies in the woods, and one mention in a medical treatise from 1608 of a girl who stumbled out of the woods blind and deaf, and died two days later. The treatise didn't include the cure for this, but someone had written in the margin: _to kill the draug, penetrate it with the ash of a draug-killed man_.

So great, they knew how to kill it, but that wasn't what they needed. Because killing it might mean that Sam was stuck for ever in limbo, and that was not acceptable.

John was terse and uncommunicative, and that was OK because Dean didn't really want to talk, at least, didn't want to talk to people who weren't Sam. And since Sam was acting kind of quiet these days, in practice that meant Dean didn't want to talk to anyone.

They made plans to go to the cemetery. Dean didn't know if Tommy Gardner had been cremated or buried, but it only took a quick search to find out. Buried. Great. They didn't talk about what they would do once they had the ashes. The not talking settled over them both like a blanket, but not comforting, smothering. But it was easier to deal with the suffocating silence than to break it, because Dean thought that if he started talking, he might break, and what use would he be to Sammy then?

And then John found it: a note in tiny, crabbed hand on a facsimile of a vellum manuscript, a note that some research student somewhere had deciphered and transcribed, and Dean found himself blessing all geeks everywhere and their bizarre preoccupation with digitising all the books in the world. _To reverse the effects, blood is required._

"There you go, Sammy," Dean grinned, noticing his brother's eyes were open and punching him lightly on the arm. "Guess you're not gonna get that cane after all."

And noticed that, open eyes or not, Sam's hand was still limp in his.

"Dad," Dean said, rising to his feet and trying to check his panic. "Dad."

And John was there, shaking Sam and calling his name (_as if that's gonna do any good at this point_), but Sam's head just lolled limply from side to side, and he was breathing _Jesus God thank you_ but that was all. _This is it. This is it_.

"Time to go," John said, hauling Sam up from the bed. "Help me get him to the car."

----

Half an hour later, the Impala screeched as it ground to a halt outside the cemetery. The night was well advanced now, midnight just around the corner, and Dean found himself wondering why they never found themselves in graveyards in the daytime. _Because someone might notice you digging up the bodies then, genius._

He glanced in the rear-view mirror, which was tilted to allow a view of Sam's prone body in the back seat, his eyes still open and staring. Dean had thought about closing them, but that was what you did when someone died. "Someone should stay here with Sammy," he said.

John had already got out of the car. "No time for that now. Get the shovels."

Dean opened the door, but paused. "Dad, what if--"

John caught his eye, and his expression softened. "I know, son," he said quietly. "But the faster we get this done, the faster we can help him. You want to help your brother, don't you?"

There was no arguing with that.

The digging seemed to take an age. Overnight, the ever-present moisture had turned to ground frost, and the soil was hard and unforgiving. It took all of Dean's self-control to keep going, but he did, because he knew this was the only way to kill the thing, that his plan of ripping it apart with his bare hands was just not going to work.

And then his shovel hit solid wood with a thunk, and moments later they were crawling out of the grave and filling it with gasoline, which felt weird because usually they used salt as well, and Dean wondered if he had ever knowingly burned an innocent person's body before.

Oh well. Kid was dead, wasn't like he needed it any more.

Dean burned his fingers on the ashes getting them into the jar they had brought, but he didn't care.

----

"Dean."

Dean glanced over at his dad, removing his eyes for a moment from the rear-view mirror. John turned into the side-road that would eventually turn into a dirt track, and threw him a worried frown.

"If Sammy stops breathing, you're going to have to do it for him."

Dean stared. "What?"

"You said there were two days between when the Gardner kid stopped breathing and when his heart stopped, right?"

Dean nodded slowly.

"We've got to give Sammy that time. We don't have a ventilator. You know how, right?"

Dean nodded again. He had done CPR classes at school, but he had learned the technique much earlier, of course, in the backyard between suturing and Judeo-Christian symbology.

"I'll do it, dad." _I'll do anything_.

----

The woods were definitely dark and deep, almost lightless, but there was nothing lovely about them that Dean could see. Staggering through the tangled undergrowth carrying Sam's dead weight (_lead__weight, _lead _weight_) and trying not to lose their bearings was pretty impossible. Lucky the Winchesters were always up for achieving the impossible.

And when they'd stepped inside the invisible circle of crosses, the rotting leaves now frozen and crunching beneath them but the smell of decay still hanging in the air, John laid Sam's legs gently down on the ground, pulled the canister of salt out from under his coat, and said _be careful_. Then he melted into the darkness.

Dean sat hunched up next to his brother. The night air was bitingly cold, but he was grateful for that, because it meant Sam's breath blew out in little puffs of frozen moisture that glinted in the glare of the flashlight, so that he didn't have to keep leaning his head right up to Sam's mouth just to make sure. He pulled out the jar of ash and unscrewed the lid, setting it carefully upright on the icy leaf-mould, then drew a breath and pulled out his knife.

"I don't know if you can feel this," he whispered, brushing the hair back from Sam's forehead, "but I'm sorry anyway." And, forcing his hand to stop trembling, he drew the knife quickly over his brother's temples, first one side, then the other. Sam made no response, the clouds of vapour still rising from his lips at regular intervals. Dean swallowed down bile, and reached over, putting one hand on each side of Sam's head, collecting the dark blood that was trickling out of the gashes that he had made _you made them Dean, you_ and smearing it over his palms. He coated the blade of his knife with it for good measure, and then stuck it in the jar of ash.

And then he was ready.

"Come and get me, you sick bastard," he muttered. "Nice, juicy brain here. Plenty of switches to flip and buttons to push." _Plenty of buttons pushed already._

He waited so long that he started to worry the blood would dry out completely and he would have to cut Sammy again. The woods were deathly silent, and the flashlight beam only penetrated a few yards before trailing off in blackness. He wished he had let dad stay with him, but somehow he had convinced him that the creature would only come if he was alone. _It only likes them up to thirty, dad. You've got to let me go it alone_.

John almost hadn't let him, Dean had seen it in his eyes. But then he had glanced in the rear view mirror and nodded, his jaw set. Even so, Dean knew he was somewhere not far away, waiting and listening. Listening as Dean was listening, straining his ears to catch any sound at all that might be carried by the still, biting air. Listening to nothing.

And then, Sam stopped breathing.

Dean started forward immediately, but before he could get anywhere near Sammy's face he felt something grab him from behind, an icy touch on either side of his head, and fireworks went off behind his eyes as his head was wrenched back, and he felt warmth beginning to drain out of him. Here it was. The thing that thought it was going to kill him.

Of course, it couldn't know that besides the fireworks and the rushing wind that filled Dean's head there was a single word repeating itself over and over in a still, small voice. _Sam. Sam. Sam._ And it couldn't know that Dean's palms were drenched with his brother's blood, the blood of a man who had survived the draug's attack for a whole week. It couldn't know that, and it didn't, until Dean roared and brought his hands up, grabbing the freezing wrists of his unseen assailant and feeling them stiffen, feeling the hands on his head loosen so he could wrench them away, pull them down and plant them on his brother, one on each temple, where Sam's blood leaked away into the forest floor.

The creature shrieked, so high and loud that it was all Dean could do not to release his grip on its wrists and clap his hands over his ears. Sam's body convulsed, his staring eyes rolling in his head, and then the creature seemed to call up some last reserves of strength and ripped itself free of Dean's grasp, the invisible hands slipping away.

But the blood seemed to have marked it somehow, silvery streaks glowing in the dark, and that was all Dean needed as he grabbed the knife that was coated with ashes of burnt bone and his brother's blood, and struck as hard as he could, plunging it into invisible flesh, and for a moment he found himself face to face with a pair of huge, empty eyes in a face that might once have been human, before the creature shrieked again and crumbled to dust.

"Oh yeah," said Dean. "Payback's a bitch."

The whole thing had been over in less than a minute, maybe only a few seconds. That was always how it was, days of waiting and tedious research and then bam. That was OK, that was how it went.

But Sam was still not breathing, and that was _not_ OK.

By the time John arrived, which couldn't have been more than a minute or two later, Dean was crying, actually _crying_ like a baby for the first time in years. But he was helping Sam breathe too, blowing into his mouth, hastily gulped air that didn't have time to fester too long in his lungs, whispering encouragement, _come on Sam breathe Sam Sam Sam Sammy_. John collapsed to the ground, watching, helpless.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, in a place immune from all the panic and fear, Dean wondered how long he could do this for, how long it would keep Sam alive. Whether he could do it all the way to the hospital, whether that would work. And swore that if he could do it, he would.

And while he was thinking that, Sam started breathing. Just like that, no coughs, no hitches, the puffs of water vapour just started curling quietly upwards again as if he had never stopped.

Dean sat back on his heels. _Jesus._

And John pulled Sam into his arms, silently weeping himself, as one son watched him dazedly and the other breathed slowly in the brittle air.

----

----

"So dad was really here?"

Dean turned to look at his little brother where he lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling. _Not staring. Not yet. _"Yeah," he said. "Did you eat my sandwich?"

"Huh," Sam said, ignoring the question. "He could have stayed until I could talk to him."

Dean snorted. "Then he would've had to put up with listening to you."

Sam rolled his eyes, and, just as it had every time so far, the expression made happiness well up from Dean's gut. Sam sat up, reached fumblingly for his coffee and took a long pull, then let out a sigh.

"God, that's the best coffee ever."

Dean grinned. Sam had only got his sense of taste back that morning, a day or two after his hearing, and since then he had eaten more than he usually did in a week.

"Hey Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"What was your vision about, anyway?"

Sam shifted slightly on the bed, a frown flitting across his face. "Nothing. I don't remember."

Dean watched him for a moment, then decided if it was something important, if it was life or death, Sam wouldn't be lying about it. "OK, whatever."

There was a long silence, but that was OK. Silence was fine now that it wasn't enforced. Then Sam turned over to face him.

"Hey Dean."

"Yeah?"

"You know I can see you're wearing my t-shirt, right?"

Dean froze and looked down. Sam's t-shirt was decidedly – well, let's say _unmanly_, but Dean had been wearing it for days, had put it on unconsciously one morning and never really felt like taking it off. "Dude," he choked. "I thought you wouldn't get your sight back for at least another couple days."

Sam grinned broadly. "Them's the breaks, big brother. Hey, and you know what? Now I get why you call me a whiny-ass dork-boy whenever I wear that thing. At least if I look anything like you."

Suddenly, Dean felt an overwhelming urge to change his clothes.

When he came back from the bathroom, Sam was already ensconced in the armchair, reading. Dean grinned. "Hey, how about that steak dinner now?" he asked. He was full to bursting, but the look of rapture Sam gave him at the suggestion was worth any number of ruptured stomach membranes.

"Really?"

"Get your coat."

"Wait a second, I've just got to finish my coffee," Sam said, and the cup flew across the room into his hand.

Sam stared at the cup. Dean stared at Sam.

After a moment, Dean strode to the courtesy coffee-making set that rested by the old TV. "Bend this spoon," he ordered, holding out the implement to Sam.

Sam stared. "Dean, you know I can't--" and the spoon bent in Dean's hand.

Dean swallowed. "Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"You think that thing might have flipped a few extra switches while it was screwing about in your brain?"

Sam looked worried. "Maybe."

There was quiet for a moment, and then Dean said quietly, "You know what this means, right?"

Sam looked up, eyes wary. "Um, no."

Dean broke into a wide grin. "It means we're gonna totally clean up when we take this show on the road."

"Ha ha," Sam growled, but Dean saw the glint of amusement in his eye as he passed Dean through the open doorway.

"Hey Sam, I always said you had no taste."

Sam stopped and looked kind of surprised. "That joke would have worked a whole lot better a couple of days ago."

Dean ruffled his brother's hair, earning himself a glower and a swat at his shoulder. "I know that, Sammy. I know."


	5. Chapter 5

Supernatural and its characters are not mine.

Thanks to daisymaygirl1, friendly, carocali (x2), laughandlove, shadowhisper (x4!), Onari, bally2cute, Riana1 (x3), empath89, Thru Terry's Eyes, ObuletShadowStalker and Phx for their kind reviews -- I'm really glad you guys seemed to enjoy it!

The story itself is done. This is just a coda. Kinda.

----

** Sensory Deprivation: Coda... kinda**

He didn't panic when he woke up and it was dark, because Dean was there, so he knew he must be OK. Didn't panic until he heard the worry in his brother's voice. Then, OK, sure, he panicked. A little.

He didn't panic on the nightmarish trip back to the car, when thorny fingers seemed to be trying to trip him up with every step, tearing at the flesh of his ankles, because his brother was an invisible presence under his arm, pulling him onwards.

He panicked in the car on the way to the hospital, knowing they were going too fast even though he couldn't see the scenery rushing by, panicked all alone in the dark little cupboard that his world had shrunk to, and didn't even remember that the everything else was still there until Dean told him not to panic, that it would be OK, that he would fix it. And he trusted his brother, so he stopped panicking, letting the fear sink back into a curdled lump in his stomach.

He didn't panic when he heard about Tommy in the hospital and realised that the same thing might happen to him, because he could tell that Dean was panicking and if both of them did it at once then they were going to go nowhere fast.

He didn't panic again until he tripped over twice on the way from the car to the motel room, and then it was because _Dean_ was supposed to be guiding him, _Dean_, but later he realised that nobody was perfect, and that his brother was just as new at this as he was.

And then, when he thought about it, it wasn't so bad. I mean, sure he couldn't read, but there were books on tape, right? And Braille, he could learn that, learning things had always come easy to him. He would learn to live with it eventually, he wouldn't be helpless forever, right? OK, he would never hunt again, but that was what he had wanted wasn't it, so surely it couldn't be responsible for the tendrils of panic curling up his spine. So everything was OK really, until

a hand came out of nowhere and tapped him on the shoulder. Then he definitely panicked, no doubt about it, and even after he had ascertained the identity of the hand's owner, the panic didn't really leave, because this was getting _bad_ and Dean hadn't fixed it yet, and he was starting to doubt that he could. Then the panic was at a constant low level, like a nagging doubt at the back of his mind, an unpleasant little voice that whispered about how this was his life now, this empty black silence that didn't even echo like a decent empty black silence ought to. But if he talked loud enough, he could drown the voice out, which was weird, because he couldn't hear himself talking and probably that meant he couldn't hear the voice either. It was OK, though, because if he talked loud enough then he didn't have to think about these things, either.

And every now and then a hand would fall on his shoulder and he would know that Dean was still there, probably mad as hell from having to listen to him babbling on about anything and everything he could think of, but there. So he didn't panic, not really, although the nagging voice told him that at some point the touch wouldn't come again.

He did panic when he suddenly felt that he was no longer talking, just moving his lips and tongue. Yup, that was panic all right, he would know it anywhere, unmistakeable. That one was pretty bad, ebbing and flowing, pretty much until he knew that dad was there, because then he was sure that Dean would fix it, no way that the combined powers of dad and Dean could fail to fix something. And anyway, after that Dean was holding his hand most of the time, so panic was unnecessary.

The last time he panicked was when he had the vision, because it _hurt_, worse than usual, and because he saw

himself, lying on the ground in the forest, and Dean leaning over him with a knife, a hunting knife, and cutting into his flesh, bathing his hands in the blood. And Dean, putting the hands of an evil creature on his temples, forcing it to interact with him, to suck at his life-force like it had before.

The voice at the back of his brain grew to a roar, saying _this is how you're going to die_.

And he replied, _no. This is Dean. Fixing it._

The voice didn't come back.

And Sam didn't panic.


End file.
